Encrypting People in Video Surveillance Feeds

A magazine article this week covered a new feature from 3VR that encrypts people within video surveillance to protect the innocent. While it should be helpful in obscuring identities of people in surveillance video released to the public, it is unlikely to prevent security users from seeing the identity of people's faces. One of the criticisms made in the article is that surveillance systems should only record when suspect activity is detected. This is simultaneously understandable and yet infeasible. It's not possible to consistently determine who is suspicious before-hand. Any encrypted video must be enabled to be decrypted so that investigators can determine who the suspect actually is.

The feature is not released in production currently. 3VR plans to release support in 2010.

[Update: This feature was never released.]